


The Not A Superhero Job

by transstevebucky



Category: Captain America (Movies), Leverage
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bisexual Male Character, Bombs, Crossover, Gay Bucky Barnes, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Torture, Multi, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Eliot Spencer, the samstevebucky is background and mostly implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:54:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24331651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transstevebucky/pseuds/transstevebucky
Summary: It’s rare a con goes so spectacularly sideways now that Parker’s running the crew.
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer, James "Bucky" Barnes & Eliot Spencer (Leverage), James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Sam Wilson
Comments: 50
Kudos: 225





	The Not A Superhero Job

**Author's Note:**

> i got smashed headfirst into leverage and all i have been thinking about for. weeks. is the ot3 and also them with bucky. so here's 10k of that ft. pining eliot, flirty gay bucky barnes, parker and hardison who love each other and their hitter so so very much and just want him to stop being stupid, and also a bomb.
> 
> content warnings for nazi killing and some extreme violence (because eliot is a dramatic motherfucker and loves his partners), and also men being stupid. 
> 
> also hand-wavey science because i dont know how bombs work or anything about science but. like. supersoldiers exist in this so like. can you expect a realistic scientific experience, really
> 
> also: read the tags! the implied homophobia is when bucky and eliot are on a rooftop talking about being gay in the 40s, if that worries you, and the implied drug use is also thanks to hydra and their neverending cascade of bullshit. torture talk is also frequent throughout, and if any of that squicks you, please take care!

**NOW**

It’s rare a con goes so spectacularly sideways now that Parker’s running the crew. 

Where Nate had alphabetized plans with necessary sacrifices, Parker’s plans had contingency after contingency. None of her crew were ever put into a situation too dangerous. 

If it got too hot, they bolted, reworked the plan, found another entry point. 

Parker viewed the world and every con in it like a lock to pick. And she was the best in her field at lockpicking.

Parker stares at him across the room, eyes flat and chin twitching with emotion she didn’t want to allow to surface. There’s a bomb strapped to her chest.

It’s not activated, yet, which is the only thing stopping Hardison from losing his fucking mind. 

The other thing is Eliot’s voice in his ear, telling him to hold on.

“You need to leave,” Parker tells him, and swallows audibly. Eliot swears over the line, and there’s the familiar sound of a fist smashing a jaw before Eliot’s forcibly regulated breathing returns. “Get out, Hardison. Don’t be stupid.”

“And- and what, Parker? Leave you here with a bomb strapped to you? No. No way. We do this together. If that- if that means we die, we do that together, too.”

Parker’s lip trembles just a little, and Hardison wishes so badly he could get to her, but he can’t.

The chain around his wrists cuts into him, and the only thing stopping him from focusing on the pain is the fact that Parker’s in a worse situation than he is. _He_ could slip free. But she can’t, so what’s the point?

Eliot taught them both a lot about restraints, how to free themselves; about weak links and how to chew through rope without breaking your teeth. Hardison kind of wishes he was paying more attention during the mandatory chains lesson instead of getting all hot under the collar watching Eliot tie himself up, so he could stop cutting up his damn hands on the rusted links. 

Last thing he needs is tetanus. 

But if he slips free, what then? Leave Parker behind? Be closer to her? Without Eliot here, there’s no way he can get the bomb off of Parker without killing them both.

Try and remove it, and the countdown clicks on. The only way to get the bomb off her without killing her is too far away to make a fucking difference (Hardison told Eliot he should travel with that paralytic agent), and now Hardison’s having to watch the way her eyes close while she tries to stay calm.

They’re fucked, with no way out. If one HYDRA goon gets the drop on Eliot (unlikely but possible, thanks to HYDRA’s penchant for amphetamine-buzzed supersoldiers), all of them are dead. 

“Hardison,” Eliot says, voice breathless over the comms, “you trust me?”

Hardison swallows back the panic building in his gut and tries to focus on the cutting pain of the chains around his wrists and ankles, the drugs in his system making him more hazy than he likes. “Yeah, Eliot, I trust you.”

“Okay.” Eliot murmurs. “Get ready to move, Alec.”

Panic hits him in the throat like a fist, and he makes a garbled squawk of a noise that Parker barks out a startled laugh at. “Eliot, no, what about-.”

“I have a plan, Alec! Just do what I fucking say, when I say it, and I swear you’ll both get out of this alive.”

The room goes deadly silent and still. 

“What do you mean we’ll get out of this alive, Eliot?” Parker’s voice is so small. It reminds Hardison of that moment years ago, Parker close to his side and saying _they’ll turn out like me_ , the way she looked so _scared_ at the thought. As if someone turning out like her could ever be anything but a blessing, but something to be cherished. “What about you?”

“Sweetheart.” Eliot murmurs. “I got a plan. Trust me. Okay?”

Parker looks like she’s just had her chest ripped open and her heart ripped out, and Hardison-. He knows her and Eliot operate on a different wavelength, working on a different level than he does. That their bond is something unbreakable and easy because of the horrors they’ve both tried to wade through. 

But he wishes, just this once, that he knew why she looked so scared. He wishes he could fix it.

“Okay.” Parker murmurs. She nods. “Okay. If you die, though, I’m going to kill you.”

Eliot’s laugh feels like -. Just. Feels. Something past the panic edging into his brain, the hazy edge to his thoughts. 

_I need to hear that for the rest of my life_ , he thinks to himself, and wonders how long that might actually be.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

**THEN**

The Winter Soldier was a myth, before 2014. 

He was the story mercs told when their kills were taken out from under them without so much as a whisper. When a shot rang out and no one was around. 

The Winter Soldier, the Asset, the Ghost, the Butcher. The man had a thousand names and all of them meant: run. Run and don’t fucking stop.

Eliot was lucky enough to never cross paths with HYDRA, so he never really figured it to be true. Thought all the stories were just mercs embarrassed about missing, stories about shots too fantastic coming from too far to be real.

The Winter Soldier was a ghost story, right up until he wasn’t.

When the helicarriers came down and Natasha Romanoff dumped all of Shield/HYDRA’s files onto the dark web, the Leverage crew were in Portland on a rare week between jobs.

Eliot had been fixing up new recipes for the brewpub, occasionally pushing a bowl to Hardison or Parker to make sure they ate something that wasn’t processed swill, when Hardison had nearly fallen off his chair and turned the news on.

Captain America had been declared a fugitive against SHIELD. Highly dangerous and erratic.

And then HYDRA making its merry way back into the national consciousness, complete with one brainwashed World War Two assassin who, actually, was the Winter Soldier, did exist, _and_ was Cap’s long-lost-presumed-dead homoerotic buddy, three fallen helicarriers prepared to take out the world’s best and brightest, and SHIELD imploding from the inside out.

They’d spent the remaining three hours of their week off reading through stories about medical experiments and supersoldiers and assassination after assassination.

Hardison had to pull away from reading to vomit three separate times. Parker left sometime after reading about the Red Room, crawling into the vents and trying to settle her head.

After that, Eliot took over with the combing through files. Hardison’s AI was doing most of the hard work anyway, decoding any of the cryptic nazi bullshit it found on the servers. He just had to read what the computer uncovered; what shit the AI dragged out from the sewers and into the daylight.

He read thousands of words and looked over god knows how many sick images of James Buchanan Barnes, the world’s longest held prisoner of war, being tortured out of his mind, having metal shoved into his body, parts carved out of him. Schematics of the arm he’d thought fake. 

The point of all of this is to say that, when everything went to unholy levels of shit and nazis came crawling out of the woodwork like the cockroaches they were, Eliot was one of the only people _actively_ looking for the Winter Soldier.

Sure, cops and governments the world over had task forces trying to root him out, but the guy had been a ghost for nearly seventy years for a reason. He disappeared, and he did it well. The governments of the world did it as a formality. Nobody expected to find him. Half of the world believed him to be dead, after Captain America and the ships hit the Potomac.

Databases combed every piece of evidence available searching for the man who’d very possibly killed JFK and a handful of other high-up politicians. 

The Soldier sent the world into a frenzy, chasing false leads and their own tails, and Eliot and Leverage, once again, picked up where the law left off.

Eliot didn’t think he was dead. There’d been footprints on the bank, whispers in some of the underground circles he still had a foot in. Footage could be doctored, but footage from the world over _disappeared_ , and that was a lot more interesting.

Eliot was the only one who got close.

Or, well. That was unfair. Leverage was the only _organisation_ that got close. 

Months of combing through the data dump and calling in favors all lead to a trail of scorched HYDRA compounds and more dead bodies than Eliot had seen at once since Kazakhstan.

And one very impatient, metal-armed, leather-daddy-lookalike World War Two relic standing in a warehouse.

The warehouse is less a warehouse and more a communications block for HYDRA scientists. Papers litter the ground in the same numbers as the bodies, obviously read through and discarded. It’s dank and dirty and covered in soot and heavy with the smell of blood and piss -for all HYDRA do sick shit to people and turn them into something twisted and cruel, they’re mighty fucking cowardly when it comes to their own ends.

Barnes looks like every picture Eliot could find of the guy from the 40’s, only with more hair and down one flesh-and-blood arm. The metal one is cool as fuck, though, even if that’s something he’d never admit to anyone. He’s all muscle and has a sharp-cut jawline, steely blue eyes and a mouth like sin. 

So maybe teenage Eliot had a crush on James Barnes. So did every self-respecting closeted bisexual. 

Knowing how competent and deadly he turned out to be -got turned into-, doesn’t exactly lessen the appeal. Even if he is a taken man. (Even if the people he’s taken by don’t realise it).

“You’ve been tracking me,” Barnes says, eyes far more alive than they’d been in some of the uncovered torture files Eliot had read through. Barnes flips a knife between his metal fingers with such speed it’s almost a blur. “You’re good at what you do.”

Eliot knew if the guy moved, he was dead. Which was why he’d turned up alone, disabling all of Hardison’s trackers and making sure to move through the city without alerting any security cams. 

Hardison and Parker were good, better every day he forced them to train, but they would never get out of a fight with Bucky Barnes alive. And they’d never even try if Eliot got taken out first.

Turning up alone was a tactical necessity, but he still didn’t _like_ it. 

He’d gotten used to a team at his back, to the both of them in his ears. Feeling safe, with them at his six.

“Thanks,” Eliot says, nodding at the bodies around them, “so are you.”

Barnes gives a feral smile, all blood-smeared teeth and the whirr of his arm. “You’re not far behind me, apparently. People sing your praises, if you know where to look.”

Eliot watches the way Barnes moves. Smooth, almost too agile, legs settled into a fighting stance and hands ever-ready. But the metal arm, there’s… Something not quite right. The plates ripple, like they’re trying to calibrate, but do it wrong. They grind, softly, with every twitch. He ignores Barnes’ pointed comment: he’d gathered Barnes would know he was looking, that he got close. That was why he’d come alone, why Barnes stayed behind when he usually ran. 

“You’re injured,” he says instead, “what happened to your arm?”

Barnes blinks, and slides the knife into one of many holsters at his hip.There’s a strange little glint in his eyes Eliot’s used to seeing in people only just kicking addictions, and he thinks about those files and the IV lines and feels sick with rage. 

“The Potomac fried some circuits. I’ve been trying to find schematics.”

“This isn’t a revenge tour?” Eliot asks, which he feels is a fair question. Up until this moment, looking James Barnes in the eye, he’d assumed it was. He’d get it, if it were. Killing Nazis isn’t something he does, any more, but it’s something he’d be fine with aiding and abetting, should the need arise. Only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

“It can’t be both?” Barnes responds, and takes out a gun from the small of his back. “Duck.”

Eliot ducks. It’d be stupid not to. The shot echoes in the warehouse, the smell of gunpowder and oil wafting heavy in the air, and the body of the Nazi trying to get the drop on him hits the ground like a bag of shit. 

“It can be both.” Eliot glances over his shoulder. The Nazi wouldn’t have had a chance, as it was, but now there’s a neat hole in his head right between his eyes. For all Barnes seems to be turning over a new anti-Nazi leaf, he sure as shit hasn’t decreased any in skill. 

But then, seventy years of torturing someone into a finely tuned weapon will do that.

“I think I might know someone who could help with your arm,” Eliot decides. 

Barnes softens visibly, mouth twitching into what might be a smile. It’s the first action that looks almost natural on him. “What’ll it cost me? I got money.”

Eliot grins. “We don’t take cash. My people and I… We work on an alternative revenue stream.”

+

Eliot turns on his trackers and puts his earpiece in and the second the comms come online, Hardison is swearing at him and Parker is making displeased crunchy noises.

“You need to stop eating those Froot Loops,” Eliot tells her, and nods at Barnes to gather the papers. “You bit the last dentist you went to.”

“I don’t like dentists.” Parker’s voice is matter of fact, completely ignoring Hardison in her own ear. “They touch too much. He deserved those stitches.”

Barnes blinks at him while he’s shuffling papers and shoving them into a duffel bag. It has a fluffy little pompom attached to the handle. Cute. 

“Where were you, man? You dropped off the face of the earth. I was about to bring in Sophie and Nate, call in favors, get Quinn over here-.”

“I was looking for someone.” Eliot clicks his neck. “I’m bringing a guest back. You know the guy I’ve been looking for? I found him.”

There’s deadly silence, and then a crash.

Parker hums. “Alec fainted.”

“Yeah,” Eliot sighs. He rubs his nose. A headache is springing up behind his eyes. “I know. It’s a very distinctive crash.”

+

Hardison is good at what he does. 

He’s also good at compartmentalizing, now he’s had practise.

By the time Eliot brings Barnes in through the back of the brewpub, there’s a bundle of tools and welding materials and bandages all piled up onto the oak table they keep for barricading use.

“I, uh.” Hardison drops his eyes when Barnes walks in, and then does a shaky salute.

Barnes makes a noise like a deflating balloon that could mean he got shot and could mean he’s trying not to laugh. “Hey, kid.”

Hardison bristles. “I am-. I am _twenty eight years old_ , I am not a kid, I cannot believe this, Eliot, you bring this man into my home, my-my workspace, my.”

Eliot rolls his eyes and pushes the duffel bag into his arms. “Schematics for the arm, how it connects, neuro-whatever bullshit. Barnes, take a seat wherever, we’ll put the CCTV up.”

Barnes nods and sits on the floor, criss-cross applesauce.

Eliot shrugs and starts going through the medical supplies, trying to work out what he’ll need. “You got any allergies?”

“Supersoldier metabolism,” Barnes responds, “no allergies. I’d rather not be injected with anything.” A look crosses his face, and he holds his metal hand up to his face. “Unless I ask first.”

Parker squawks behind him and looks halfway in love, kicking her feet eagerly where she’s sat on the back of the couch. 

Eliot frowns. “We’re not going to do anything you don’t ask for,” he promises, but Barnes just shrugs and gives Parker a-. Is that a wink? Jesus Christ. This is all such a terrible idea.

“Okay, so,” Hardison says, recovering from his indignation, and flicking through the schematics. They’re a little bloody and dust covered, but he doesn’t mention it. “I’ve done my research over the past few months, trying to find anything out about the tech, uh. Your arm, I mean. Sorry. It’s new, it’s adapted, it’s damn near alien. Even prosthesis made in the last few years come nowhere near to your level of maneuverability or function.”

“Nazis don’t exactly adhere to the Hippocratic oath. Allows a lot of leeway.” 

Eliot stares at Barnes, and thinks maybe this guy is sort of a shit. 

Hardison swallows, and keeps going. “So, uh. Yeah, I don’t have too great an understanding on how it would work, but I know the basics of grafting and metal plating and the wiring is pretty simple considering the advancement of the prosthesis, and-. Oh, yeah, I’m guessing you took those trackers out they put in you?”

Hardison yanks on a pair of rubber gloves, and Barnes goes still.

“No gloves.” His voice brooks no argument, hand clenching into a fist on his lap. “No scrubs, no gloves, no fuckin’ love.”

“I don’t like them either,” Parker chirps in, after the room has gone deadly quiet with a distinct _what the fuck even_ kind of vibe, “bad memories. We’ve all got stuff. That’s one of yours.”

Barnes shifts to look at Parker, and Parker (because she is, at her core, bizarre and utterly lovable) just blinks and wiggles her fingers at him. Barnes’ face splits into an uneven smile that’s so charming it makes the bisexual history buff in Eliot go woozy.

“I took the trackers out,” Barnes adds, after his goofy sort-of-human smile, “I cut them all out after the Potomac.”

Eliot winces and thinks about the placements of all those trackers; the skin between his shoulder blades, the soft flesh at the back of his knee, the ones pressed inside the arm.

“Well, there’s that,” Hardison says, throwing the gloves into the trash. He looks good, like this, even if his shoulders still hold too much tension. All dark skin glowing in the warm-lit room and in his element, surrounded by tech equipment. “Tell me if there’s any pain when I start, okay?”

Barnes blinks. “Why?”

Hardison sighs. “I hate you types, man. Because pain is bad. Because it makes shit difficult. I can’t do my job if you won’t do yours by telling me what’s going on, okay?”

Barnes gives him a once over, and then a look almost like a leer comes over him, and Jesus Christ. Eliot had read a lot as a young kid about Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers, their legendary kinship and brotherhood, and part of it had been because there was nothing platonic about it. It was romance, plain and simple.

No heterosexual man goes half-cocked behind enemy lines armed only with a wooden shield and knowledge of his buddy’s capture.

So. Those particular rumors were true, then. Barnes was a flirt, and he was also at least a little gay. 

“Aye aye, Cap’n,” Barnes says, and Hardison chokes a little on his own tongue.

His hands only shake a little when he starts in on the methodical wire-stripping, though, which is more than Eliot can say about the time he had to stitch up a gash in Parker’s thigh.

+

Barnes comes with them on jobs, occasionally, as back up. It’s an irregular kind of set up, and it’s not like he lives with them, but he’s always willing to hit a couple heads together to help the innocent.

He drops in to the brewpub to eat some of Eliot’s chili and give a lead on cases, and every now and then Eliot comes back to his apartment to find all of them there; Parker, Hardison, and Barnes. Barnes is usually sat patiently between Parker’s bony knees, letting her braid his hair to her heart’s content. He’ll stretch out his metal arm for Hardison to tinker with, and he looks at peace.

Eliot knows he spends time in New York and DC, hanging around the Avengers and getting to know Steve Rogers again (and developing a crush on Sam Wilson, Falcon, guy who got Eliot out of a sticky spot once), but he seems to like the brewpub. He seems to like _Leverage_ , views Parker as a little sister and Eliot as a brother-in-arms, Hardison as a brother and friend without any of Rogers’ overbearing need to burrow in.

Parker calls him _Bucky_ and Hardison calls him _Jimmy_ when he’s trying to be a little asshole, and Barnes’ smiles don’t look so strained.

And Eliot spars with him, and it barely winds either of them, and he remembers Russia and he hates it, that he has an answer, at the same time that he’s grateful.

It’s four months after Eliot finds him when Barnes disappears from the brewpub after a night of watching him interact with the team, and Eliot sighs.

He gives him a couple minutes before following him, knowing the conversation they’re about to have and dreading it.

The rooftop is cool and lit only by the soft glow of the cigarette between Barnes’ teeth when he climbs up the stairs.

Eliot can see the rest of Portland stretched out below them, a rolling tide of lights and car horns and people yelling in the distance. He gets why Parker comes up here to think, why she spends so much of her time hanging above the city, cocooned in a harness of her own design.

He’d known Barnes would figure it out. He just didn’t think it would be so soon.

“Those things will kill you,” Eliot says, dropping down beside him.

Barnes scoffs. “Somethin’ oughta.”

Eliot watches as his metal hand stubs the cigarette out between two shiny fingers, and sighs. “Thanks. For not… telling them.”

“It’s yours to tell,” Barnes says, and his voice sounds a little hollow, distant. “I think they’d want to know, though. They worry about you.”

Eliot ignores the squirming thing in his gut at the thought of that. “I don’t think knowing would help that.”

Barnes cuts a glance at him, steel blue eyes raking over him like he’s working out the best place for a hit. He turns away after a second, leaning back onto his elbows and beating his booted feet against the brickwork. “They think you’re more breakable than you are.”

Eliot shrugs. “Everyone dies with enough of an impact.” And then he winces. “Shit, I mean-”

Barnes grins at him, quick and sharp. “Falling off that train was the least traumatising thing that’s happened to me since the war. It’s fine.”

Eliot stares at the skyline. Barnes is at ease beside him, arm whirring as he moves. He thinks about Moscow. The cage. The injections like fire in his veins and the way everything was sharper, after. He thought maybe it was PTSD; hypervigilance refusing to let him rest.

He’d brushed it off for years, ignored the way his body didn’t creak or break so easy, the way bones knitted together faster than they should and bullets barely broke his stride. He dismissed it as skill for a long time, because the alternative was thinking someone had altered him in some way, and that-. What could he do with that?

And then the helicarriers fell down. 

James Buchanan Barnes, 107th infantry, only man of the Howling Commandos to give his life, emerged as the greatest assassin of the century, a ghost shrouded in blood.

Black Widow dumped all of SHIELDRA’s files onto the dark web, and Hardison’s bots went looking, and Eliot read until his eyes went crossed.

And through all the scientific mumbo-jumbo and the torture depictions and the murder and the bloodied history the nazis carved out for themselves, Eliot realised what really happened before he got out of Russia.

“There’s a reason you hunted so hard,” Barnes says, and there’s no judgment. There wouldn’t be. “It’s the same reason I couldn’t just let them crawl back under a rock to find someone else.”

Eliot flinches. “But I did. Let it go. After. If I’d thought about it, if I’d figured it out sooner, then…”

Barnes turns to stare at him. “Then what? You think you could find me? Or Natalia? Any of the other victims of Hydra? You think you’d be safe from them, after escaping, after having the serum pumped into you? They’d cut you open and use you like a weapon, same as me. Same as her. Same as all the others.”

Eliot swallows. “And instead I went and chose who to get used by.”

Barnes sighs. “We make mistakes. We learn. We mourn. We have panic attacks and vomit at three in the morning because we can still smell the blood. We move on.” Barnes locks eyes with him, then. Urgent and almost afraid, and Eliot looks back because he gets what that look is. “We move on. We _get_ to move on.”

“We learn who to fight for.”

Barnes swallows. His metal hand clenches and Eliot can hear the way the leather creaks and resists against the strength. “I get why you don’t want them to know. It’s why I’m not ready to go back to mine full time, yet. But they know enough about who you are to not turn you away. This won’t be what does it.” He snorts. “And sure as hell nothing’s turning Stevie’s dumbass away from me.”

Eliot smiles, but it hurts. Everything hurts, in the muted way he’s gotten so used to. And then it’ll stop hurting. But maybe that’s the worst part. The things he’s done, and he still gets to stop hurting.

“You and Rogers, were you…?” It’s something he’s wanted to ask since he dragged Barnes in from the cold and forced some of his mom’s rich stew down his throat. 

He’s read enough, seen enough, done enough, to know the way Barnes looks when he talks or thinks about Rogers isn’t brotherhood. It’s the way Eliot looks at Hardison and Parker, the way he looked at Aimee, the way he looked at a trail of men in the army and after.

Barnes quirks a smile. “He had me when he thought he had no one. And then he had Carter and he thought he’d lost me. And then he had both of us, in different ways. And then I fell.” He shrugs. “He always had me. He’s just too stupid to realise what that meant.”

“You didn’t live in the best time for gay men,” Eliot tells him, and hates himself. Because. Obviously Barnes knows that. “Maybe he was scared.”

Barnes gives him a look that tells him, plain and simple, he thinks Eliot is dumber’n a bag of rocks. “Steve Rogers wasn’t scared of shit. Steve Rogers got arrested more times than I’ve got fingers ‘cause he went and helped out at a queer bar bein’ raided. Steve Rogers drew bluesies and got paid under the table. Steve Rogers waited for me to get shipped off to Basic and go get himself pumped full of drugs by a guy he saw fail to make a car fly and thought it was a good idea.” 

Barnes sounds fond, affectionate, so deeply warm it makes something inside of Eliot ache.

“No. Steve weren’t the scared one. Steve liked women just fine, even when he liked men, too. I was shit scared, ‘cause I didn’t. Fellas like me were meant to like dames, and instead I stared at his bony ass and wanted him to climb me like a tree ‘til he had an asthma attack.”

Eliot’s bark of laughter bounces off the rooftops, and Barnes grins wide and true at him. 

It ripples between them, for a moment, long and blistering, and Eliot rolls his head on his shoulders to stare at Barnes in the glow of the city, the glint of his eyes. He really is stupidly beautiful. “You know, if you weren’t so balls-deep in love with Captain America and I wasn’t taken by them, we’d make a pretty hot couple.”

Barnes wiggles his eyebrows and his metal fingers in a _come hither_ motion, and Eliot feels lighter than he has in days.

“Tell them.” Barnes presses one hand to the back of his neck, stroking over the braids Parker put in to Eliot’s hair. “That you love them, and that they’re not going to lose you easily. It’s not worth waiting for the right time. The right time is whenever they’re with you.”

Eliot leans into his hand and kisses his metal wrist and laughs at the way Barnes blushes. “Okay, Bucky.”

Barnes grins at him, sharp and wild, and Eliot thinks: if I weren’t all but a married man, I’d lay you out like pastry and rail you stupid.

As it is, though, the only people he wants and craves are downstairs in the warm, so. There it is.

**NOW**

Bucky’s just finished watering the herbs when the call comes through.

It’s not the phone he uses with the team; that one’s Stark-made and almost disgustingly modern with a virulently pink and sparkly case. 

It’s the black flip-phone Hardison chucked at him after the last time he fixed his arm. The one for emergencies only. Not to be ignored.

He drops the watering can and flips it open within three sharp vibrations, presses it between his shoulder and his ear while he gets to the go bag tucked under the kitchen sink. “Speak.”

“Barnes,” Spencer’s voice comes through, sharp and breathless. There’s the sound of a scuffle in the background, fists hitting skin, bones snapping on impact. “I need to call in that favor.”

When Bucky found Leverage he’d been sort of a shitshow.

Or. Well. When Leverage found him.

(Bucky and Eliot aren’t exactly agreed on the exact terms of their meeting -Bucky insists (correctly) that he’d been leaving a trail to follow the moment he knew someone was close. Eliot, smug sonuvabitch that he is, insists that Bucky had just gotten sloppy.)

Regardless. He’d been a hot fucking mess. He’d been running on close to empty by the time they -. Collided. His arm was halfway out of its socket, sparking whenever it wasn’t grinding like two teenagers with fake ID’s in a club, and his head had been shot. Half his memories had been Hydra and their nazi bullshit, all the kills they’d made him do, all the triggers they’d implanted in him. The rest had been a muddied mess of the war and the years before it, a blond spitfire with too much vinegar in him to attract any sweetness to him, a mother with warm hugs and an iron grip on her family.

He’d been half-man half-somethingfuckingelse at the time, soaked up to his elbows in blood and wanting something he didn’t even really have a name for. 

Spencer and his ragtag team had sort of helped soften the road to recovery. Given him a few good meals and a place to crash, should he ever happen to be in Portland. Hardison had given him a whole host of upgrades on the arm and quick fixes if it ever got broken on a job, and Parker -. Was… Usually trying to use him like a personal jungle gym.

But it helped, having people who didn’t fear him, who didn’t look at him like a memory that still hurt like a pressed on bruise.

Bucky’s got a home now, with Steve and Sam. Nat, whenever she feels like dropping in. But the Leverage crew are the first people who looked at him like an entirely new entity. Not Captain America’s best friend, not a terrorist, not a victim, not a veteran. Some mixed up, fucked up bastard with more knives than places to store them and a want in his bones for something soft.

The Leverage crew gave him the first taste of what a home should be. 

He owes them whatever it takes to keep them safe, and not only because he knows they won’t ask too much of him. He owes them because they looked at him in the gutter and said _ain’t we all been there_ and force fed him homemade pate and French bread ‘til he felt like he was going to die.

Bucky’s not ever going to tell them that, though. The thought of the blackmail material _alone._ Perish the motherfucking thought.

“Where are you?”

Eliot rattles off some coordinates, interspersed with the sound of a knife flipping through the air. 

Bucky tightens the laces on his boots and holsters a couple of his Glock 17’s and a handful of buck knives and some of Nat’s custom made garrotte wires. “En route. See you in ten.”

“Try to make it five.” Eliot’s voice brooks no argument, which makes Bucky pause before he slips out of the window and drops to the ground of the alley. “They’ve got Parker with a bomb strapped to her chest and Hardison chained up watching her.”

Bucky feels white hot rage cover him from head to toe like Sam’s lobster-boiling showers. “Be ready in three.”

+

Eliot turns off the comms. Just -. For a minute.

Barnes ( _call me Bucky_ ) gets how they operate, understands it on a fundamental level -did before he got his memories back thanks to some mix of science and magic that made Hardison near cream his pants. They’re a team. A little more than that. A family. 

And he gets that Eliot is their protector, it’s his given role. It’s the only role in a long time that fits right and fits well. It doesn’t chafe at him like wetwork did, like the army did.

Sometimes protecting Parker and Hardison means not letting them hear the things he says, the things he thinks.

“I love them,” he tells Barnes, in a brief pause in the fighting. There’s nazis fucking everywhere. HYDRA sure as hell is an apt name. Cut off one head, two more grow in its place. About time someone salted the fucking wound and burned the whole damn body. “Whatever you gotta do to get them out safe, okay?”

Barnes’ response is fast. “I’d do that even if you didn’t love them, Spencer.”

Eliot smiles. There’s the taste of blood in his mouth, and he’s not sure if it’s his or the chunk he took out of one of the goons when they got too close. “If you wanna say no to my play, you can. You can call the shots once you’ve got visual. I trust you with them.”

“Tell me the play, and then I’ll figure out if I’ll hate you for it.” 

Eliot laughs. He takes out one of his throwing knives from the stitched-in holster at his belt and makes sure it lands right in the nazi’s throat. Blood sprays in an arc from the wound and it should sicken him. It should make something from his old life flare, dark and unacceptable, but all he can think about is Parker and Hardison alone in that place, a bomb strapped to her chest, Hardison in chains. 

He knows why they chose to chain Hardison, why they gave the bomb to Parker. It swells rage up under his ribs like a tidal wave. 

Killing nazis isn’t killing people. It’s killing a fucking virus. Something insidious and sick in the wells of society, incurable. If he doesn’t take them out, they’ll get other people. People without backup, without supersoldiers on speed dial, without Eliot at their backs.

And that’s not an acceptable loss.

Eliot already knows he’s going to hell. He’s just making sure he’s taking as many bad guys down with him as he can when he goes.

“The bomb’s smart. It’s programmed into the electric impulses in her brain. It’ll know if it’s put on anyone else; helps make sure they don’t blow themselves up. Only, say, if you happen to have a highly intuitive, mobile prosthetic far beyond the norm of what’s available on the market, made to withhold up to three hundred thousand volts and sustain damage from IED’s, well.”

Bucky is quiet on the other line for a moment, and then there’s the distinctive sound of a zipline and the sharp rush of wind that comes with dropping from a large height. “Disconnect it from her at the same time it’s connected to my arm. Hm. Not terrible. I’d have to strip some of the wires, add some of my own. They’re stronger, hold conduction better. Won’t burn up right away.”

“That’s fine. Do whatever you need to do. I’ll be there after you. I’ll clear the perimeter for an exit.”

There’s the sound of metal on brick, scraping quickly, and then footsteps. “Copy. I’m at the warehouse. No visual yet, but I’ll blow open a hole in the wall.”

Eliot grins. “Subtle of you.”

“Well,” Bucky says, “they’ve rattled my chains.”

Eliot ducks under an electrified baton and swings the guy’s arm back into his own stomach. The guy vibrates like a cheap sex toy and drops like a sack of shit, and Eliot stares at his limp form on the ground and crushes his ribs in until he hears the sound of a lung deflating.

“Me, too.”

Before he can focus on leaving the body behind him, Bucky speaks up one last time. “You should tell them. Time runs out quicker than you think it does.”

“You’re a hundred fucking years old!” Eliot retorts, which is childish.

“I spent most of them being tortured out of my humanity and being pointed at things to kill,” Bucky replies, very evenly for someone who is clearly piecing together a bomb of his own. “And I’ve only just managed to let myself love two people the way they deserve. The way I deserve to be loved. It’s good, being loved like that. You deserve it.”

Eliot swallows. He thinks about Parker’s smile when she jumps off of a building, the way Hardison lights up learning something new to add to his repertoire. He thinks about a brewpub that’s his in all but name, bought by Hardison and with high rafters for Parker to rappel from.

Maybe it’s not about them not wanting him. Maybe it’s just been them waiting for him to come to them on his own terms.

“After we get out of this alive.”

“Roger that, boss.” And the comms switch off.

Eliot tries to pretend he’s not smiling as he slips behind the wheel of a stolen SUV, but the ache in his cheeks is fooling nobody.

+

Parker will give this to the nazis: they get how to really fuck with your head.

Not that she expected anything less. She’s seen the look in Bucky’s eyes, read the files about the Red Room and the experiments on soldiers and on Bucky himself. 

It’s been nearly a decade since she killed someone, but she thinks she came close reading those files. 

“It’s going to be fine,” she tells Hardison, which is blatantly a fucking lie. She can’t say for sure if it’s going to be okay. She can guess, and she can approximate an outcome thanks to their history of squeezing out of very tight spots, but there’s really no telling for sure. What she does know is that if Hardison panic-spirals he won’t get out, he won’t be able to hear Eliot or take in information.

And Hardison is the best of them. Alec is their moral compass. It’s not acceptable to lose him. She won’t let it happen. 

She’ll willingly die alone if it means Alec and Eliot get out.

“Alec,” she says, and he looks at her. He’s so beautiful. Even bloodied and bruised and battered and terrified, he’s so beautiful. It makes something hurt in her chest, and if she could get to it she’d hold her hand over her ribs to make sure they don’t split apart. “I need you to breathe, okay? Eliot is good. He’s the best. And so are we. We can do this, okay? Together. But we can only do this together.”

Hardison’s eyes are wide and wet, but he nods, focusing in on her face, watching the way she speaks. Even after so much time with him having that much of his attention on her feels like eyes to the core of her. Like being truly, completely seen. “Good.” She smiles at him, even though it makes the split in her lip reopen. “I love you.”

Hardison makes a noise like he’s being choked, and over the comms it sounds like Eliot just had the wind knocked out of him.

Parker knows she doesn’t say it enough. But this is the kind of time people always say it in movies, and it feels right. It means Alec can’t take his eyes off her, can’t focus on anything else. Not the rubbed raw skin of his wrists or the bomb tied to her chest or the sound of Eliot fighting towards them on comms.

“I love you, too,” Hardison whispers, voice cracked and aching. Parker wishes she could hold him, be close to him. He needs it, and maybe she needs it a little, too. “We’re going to be okay.”

Eliot makes a sound like a broken open water pipe -a hiss of sound and a splutter. “You’re both gonna be fine. I made you a promise, and I won’t break it, okay? We’ve got you.”

Parker’s so focused on the way his voice sounds; that sweet drawl with the gruffness on top, the way it sounds hearing him say _I made you a promise_ , the way it sounds exactly the same as it had when he’d said _til my dying day_ three years ago, that she almost misses the last part.

Almost.

“Who’s we?” Hardison asks, at the same time she opens her mouth to ask _what do you mean we’ll be fine? What about you? What about us would be fine without you?_

She doesn’t get the chance.

That’s the moment when the sound of a powering up explosive throws her and Hardison to the ground in a shower of rubble and sparks, and a hand wraps around her wrist. The hand is firm and almost shockingly cold except for small points of warmth from the leather shielding the palms.

Parker swallows. All she can taste is ash and the familiar tang of gunpowder, charcoal thick on her tongue. The clanging in her ears feels like it’s vibrating all the way through to her bones, stretching out heavy on every part of her, and if she could move she’d try to cover her ears but she _can’t_.

It’s hard to make anything out through the dust and smoke. A messy halo of hair and strong shoulders. But the wrong shoulders. Not _Eliot_ ’s shoulders, that usually come paired with rescue and pretty hair.

“Hey, Parker,” the voice attached to the hand is familiar, though Brooklyn-heavy, and Parker blinks through all the ash to stare at Bucky’s face, the rage shadowed behind his eyes. There’s a bit of blood smeared on his mouth, but he’s smiling. Just a little. His metal arm whirrs when he cradles her jaw, gentler than you’d think him capable of. “You okay?”

“ _You’re_ the we!” She manages to get out, before allowing the grey at the edge of her vision to pull her in.

The clanging, blessedly, falls into the dark with her.

+

Parker starts coming back around when Bucky’s got his teeth full of colorful wires and his arm opened up by his side.

She blinks and tries to crawl out from under him, tries to bat the wires out of his mouth, but Bucky just gives her a small head-shake and holds her down with his flesh hand. Her head spins, throbbing, and she knows it’s more the after affect of a bomb going off too close and the drugs leaving her system (she hates nazis she fucking _hates nazis_ which was true before but doubly so now), but it still makes her panic a little. 

The woozy feeling is too similar to so much of her childhood, concussions and nausea and vomiting into her cupped hands and hiding it away before it was found.

“What are you doing?” Parker asks, voice not slurring but a little slower than normal, and Hardison’s hands (she’d know them anywhere) settle over her head, stroking through her hair.

“Hang on, baby,” Hardison murmurs, voice a lull in her ear, and if she squints she can make out the curve of his jaw, the blood crusted at his nose. “He’s workin’.”

“Where’s Eliot?” She almost jolts up upon realising she can’t feel Eliot’s presence, but Bucky’s large hand splays further over her sternum to prevent it. His flesh hand is overly warm, always running hotter than unenhanced humans, and she wishes she could press it to the cold parts inside of her that are panicking like a spooked rabbit.

Parker stares at the way he’s knotting the wires into his metal arm, twisting them together and connecting them, ones yet to be switched over sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

“He’s securing the perimeter.” Hardison tells her, and rubs his thumbs behind her ears.

Parker holds back from purring only by force of will and the headache radiating through her skull.

“Did he tell you to say that?” Parker asks, and reaches out to touch Bucky’s arm. It’s smeared with something slick and shiny, and the smell is familiar. Sharp in her nose. Some kind of mechanical oil she makes Hardison scrub off before he hugs her. And the thick scent of coppery blood, too. “You’ve hurt yourself.”

Bucky smiles at her around the last wire before he tucks it inside of his arm, and shakes his head. “No, doll. This is just maintenance. It doesn’t hurt.”

Parker frowns. “You promise?”

She’s used to Eliot being like this. Bucky is usually better at admitting when something hurts, although it takes more for him to notice. Eliot brushes off bruises and cuts and stab wounds and everything else like it barely matters, like _he_ barely matters, like they wouldn’t fall apart without him.

Bucky shrugs, and Hardison’s hands tremble against her head for a moment, and she closes her eyes.

“You’re attaching it to your arm to control the explosion.” Just the thought makes her feel sick. Bucky’s been through _enough_. He’s lost _enough_. Hasn’t he? Does the world have to take this, too? She doesn’t want to be the reason he loses his arm _again_. “That’ll kill you.”

“Maybe it would’ve.” Bucky smirks at her, but then his eyes go all soft and crinkly. He strokes her cheek with his flesh hand, sticky with oil and blood. “But a smart guy kitted it out with the ability to withstand an IED and three hundred thousand volts. It’ll short it out, but I figure I can call in a favor for that.”

“It’ll still _hurt_!” Parker insists, because she’s not an idiot. She’s seen the scarring, the claw marks where he’d tried to rip the thing off, the metal in his spine from trying to keep the thing anchored inside of him. She knows the way he gets headaches, sometimes, when the arm malfunctions.

“It always hurts.” Bucky’s voice is gentle, now, but matter-of-fact. He finishes twisting a blue and a red wire together and connects them to his arm at the same time he flips something on the bomb now cradled in his lap. “This is just a worthwhile pain.”

Hardison laughs, but it sounds sad. “You and Eliot really should not hang out any more. It ain’t good for your morale.”

“Sweetheart,” Bucky says, Brooklyn-smooth, and it must be how he sounded before the war, before the nazis chewed him up and spat him out angry but still so kind, “my morale was killed before Spencer ever came knockin’.”

As if his name is a trigger, the door to the warehouse opens and Parker feels Eliot enter the room, hears his near-silent booted feet, the sound of his deliberately calm breaths.

He stumbles the last few steps towards them, and Parker reaches out and grips his leg with a hand that would be too weak to pull her up a rope. The thought makes fear grip her guts all over again, but Eliot’s hand joins Alec’s on her head and she stills.

“Hey,” Eliot whispers, voice rough and rumbly, and there’s bruises blooming over his face, eye swelling, and he’s so _pretty_. “You scared me, darling.”

Parker makes a fist and punches him. He snorts, catches her hand and presses a shaky kiss to her knuckles. It feels like something important and vital catches in her chest, and she wants to hold her ribs, keep her heart where it should be. “Is this your plan? Are you - why would you want him to-. We’re friends, we don’t- . We’re your _team_ , we’re a team, why would you-.”

Eliot’s face goes heartbreakingly vulnerable before he locks it back up into his usual grumpy mask. “If he’d said no, I would have found something else.”

“I offered, Parker,” Bucky says, and he nods to Eliot. “The arm can withstand this. You can’t. You’re all squishy parts.”

Parker frowns, but it makes her eyeballs hurt. “I’m not _squishy_.”

“Your spine isn’t reinforced with admantium and vibranium, though,” Bucky chides, booping her on the nose.

Bucky shuts his arm up tight and slowly pulls the bomb off of her lap, and Parker’s breath hitches as the weight finally leaves. It hadn’t been heavy, really. It was the idea of the thing. A constant pressure of _if you do you take Alec with you and what will Eliot do he’ll blame himself it’ll be your fault,_ being taken off her shoulders. Her lap. 

The bomb doesn’t go boom, and Bucky sighs and cracks his neck. “I won’t lie, though. This is gonna suck.”

“We’ll owe you big time, okay?” Eliot murmurs, and he sounds almost pained, like the idea of Bucky doing this hurts him, and Parker wishes she could move without the world going wibbly-wobbly like she’s on bad painkillers. “Anything you want.”

Bucky grins, almost a leer. “ _Anything_?”

Eliot goes pink. “Maybe.”

Parker’s tummy hurts. She’d thought. Bucky’s with Sam and Steve, and she’d thought maybe Eliot wanted -. Them. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe -. Maybe she’s missed those people cues, again, the ones she’s tried so hard to learn but that always feel so out of reach. 

She makes a wounded noise and Alec presses a kiss to her forehead and slowly works her up into a sitting position. Parker closes her eyes tight against the wave of movement that feels like she’s on a boat and settles against Alec’s steady warmth. 

“Okay.” Bucky smiles. Eliot pulls a hair tie off his own wrist and pulls Bucky’s hair up and out of the way. “Thanks. Arm’s gonna be out of commission until I can figure out a way to pull in a favor from Stark.”

“Oh, I see how it is. I’m not good enough for you, now.” Alec’s voice is a little emotional and wobbly, deep and vibrating like a kitten purring through to Parker’s chest. 

Bucky snorts. “You’re good, but you haven’t got access to surgical equipment and enough tranquilizer to bring down an elephant if this fucks something up in the neuro-link. I’ll let you play with it after we’ve ascertained I’m not a glorified vegetable.”

Parker winces, and Eliot grips her hand so tight it nearly hurts. It makes something unravel inside her. It’s good, the pressure, like she’s being pushed together and fixed.

Nothing happens, at first, when Bucky presses the detonator.

There’s the solid click. And then there’s silence. Echoing in the warehouse, off the three intact walls.

And then it’s like he’s just been lit up from the inside, arm going blue-white with the heat, electricity crackling in the air. Eliot’s hair stands on end and Parker’s frizzes even further, and Bucky closes his eyes and Alec clutches her so tight her ribs ache.

Bucky is almost creepily still, while his arm goes haywire. The metal is so hot it’s letting off tendrils of steam and smoke, the acrid smell of cooking flesh from the join at his shoulder choking them all. 

And then, just when Parker’s hit her limit, when she wants to say _make it stop please please stop it make it stop_ , Bucky’s face smooths back out and he lets out a sharp breath that would be a scream, on anyone else.

His hand reaches for his shoulder, and comes back bloody and flinching a little from the heat radiating off the cooked skin. Besides that, though, he looks okay. There’s no blood coming from his nose or his ears or his eyes, and he looks completely cognizant, which is more than Parker can say for herself.

They all stare at the arm, the plates open and slack, the way the wires are still pulsing and almost seem alive. Oil drips like blood down his fingers, and Parker clenches onto Eliot and leans into Alec and says, “Bucky?” and Bucky grins at her, and it’s okay.

It’s okay. He’s hurting, but he’ll be okay. They’ll fix it. He’ll fix it. He’ll go to Stark’s tower in New York (whose security isn’t everything it’s made out to be, really), and he’ll be fixed up, and Parker won’t lose him.

“It worked.” Alec’s voice is breathy underneath her. “It worked!”

Bucky smiles. “Yeah, kid. Good job.”

Eliot grabs Bucky close to him and nuzzles close to his cheek and says “thank Christ, brother, least I don’t gotta tell your boyfriends I got you killed,” and suddenly the world seems a little less scary.

Parker presses back into Alec and knows he’s thinking the same thing. 

It’s about time they have that Scary Feelings Talk.

+

The way back to the brew pub (and the waiting ride to New York for Barnes, courtesy of SteveandBuckyandSam’s capital C Connections and Stark’s billions) is mostly silent, but Parker won’t stop staring at him.

It’s starting to freak him out. He’s used to her eyes on him; she’s still not used to the way people seem to work, still defaults to her slightly off way of doing things, but this is more intense than usual. It’s like she’s trying to work him out, read every angle and look and everything in him, and he’s scared of what she might unlock.

Eliot knows he looks a mess, all bruised and bloody and limping, but he’s definitely looked worse. That Carnival job, for one, but the one they pulled last year when he got his shit handed to him by an actual sumo wrestler, too.

But he doesn’t think that’s it. Every time he meets her eyes, she just stares harder, bright eyes completely focused in on him.

It makes him feel like he’s caught in a trap.

Hardison is being more normal, at least. He’s watching Eliot, but he’s also watching Parker and checking on Barnes and fixing what he can with what he’s got in Lucille 5.0. He, at least, is not so hyper focused on Eliot that it feels like he’s got a sniper trained right on his face.

“What?” He barks, once they’ve handed Barnes off to the dubiously capable hands of Captain America and Beautiful Boyfriend Who Eliot Once Kissed, and they’re slumped down in the brew pump with a pack of ice each.

Parker crosses her arms. “You never make a plan that might end with you getting killed. Never.”

“It’s my job.” And it is, too. He’d rather die for them than live and know he wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t good enough to save them. “Parker. This is what I do.”

“No!” Her voice is strangled and sharp and she looks a mess, hair out to here and eyes red and lips cracked and bloodied (Eliot is glad he killed those nazis). “You don’t die! We don’t die! We have to make it! All of us! There’s no us without you. There’s no.” She smacks her chest, hard, and Eliot listens to the way her palm smacks heavy against her skin. “ _Us_. Without you here. We can’t replace you. We can’t.”

She looks so broken apart, like she had down in that crevasse, saying: _I want to do the right thing_. And Eliot’s job might be fighting, it might be dying if the situation calls for, but more than anything it’s protecting Parker and Hardison from the worst the world has to offer.

And seeing her torn open and hurting and close to tears like this, it makes him feel like someone just carved his chest open and took his heart and buried it deep. 

Alec presses his hands over his mouth while Parker hits her chest and looks distraught, leans against her and says, “mama, be careful, you’re hurting.”

And Parker leans into him and stares at Eliot and Eliot looks back, at the both of them, at these two people he loves with everything he has left in him. These people who hold the only untarnished, good parts of his soul, and all he can think is: _I was done for you from the moment we fucking met._

“You’re together, Parker, you’d have each other.” His voice is gentle, because he doesn’t get what she’s saying. He understands Parker, she understands him, but sometimes it’s still like they live on different frequencies and he needs time to patch a way in. “I’ll always make sure you have each other.”

Alec leans towards him, mouth set in a frown. He’s beat to shit, ice pack cradled against his mouth, and he glares. “Hey, Eliot. No. We’re not us without you. There is nothing left without you.” He reaches towards Parker and she grips his hand, both dirtied and smudged but still holding each other up and together. “There is no Leverage, no team, without you. _You._ Not our hitter, not a grifter. If you died, that’s it. We’d give it up. There would be no point. You get me, man?”

No.

The truth is that Eliot doesn’t get him.

Hardison is a good man. He’s the best of them. He’s the kind one, the moral compass, the one who sees good and does good and is kind until he’s ruthless. (And even when he’s ruthless, it’s out of kindness: he helps and he helps and he _helps_ because he wants to be good and enough and can’t he see that he is, already, he’s always been enough).

Eliot doesn’t get why Parker and Hardison, who are so good and so largely untainted by the shit they’ve lived through, could ever look at someone like him and think: there’s no point without you.

Someone who’s killed far more than he wants to think about. Who remembers every death and every moment like a physical weight. Who doesn’t sleep more than three hours a night. Who screams himself awake five nights out of seven, who sleeps with a knife under his pillow and eight more within reach.

“No.” He says, because he owes them his honesty. He owes them everything, every part of his body and soul they don’t yet hold with cupped and unaware hands. “I don’t. I-. I’ve done shit, I’ve been a fucking awful person, I’m not a good person, Ha-. Alec. Parker, I don’t. I’m not worth you-.”

“You are.” Parker’s voice is sharp and unwavering, and she lunges up and darts towards him and it’s only his years of experience in dealing with Parker that has him catching her before she barrels herself right into his chest. She wraps herself around him, climbing into his lap and burying her face in his hair, and he can smell her, feel her, every inch of her real and alive. He can hear her pulse in her throat, rabbit-quick. “You are. Eliot, please, we-. We want you. We need you. Alec?”

Alec steps close, then, hand pressing Eliot’s head further into the soft skin of Parker’s chest, thumb stroking his ear, holding tight to his hair. “We do, man. We need you. We need you to stay us. You’re a part of that us. We’re not-. We’re not whole without you, Eliot.”

Eliot feels like his lungs have been pierced. He feels like he’s floating and like his stomach is an empty, yawning cavern: so desperate and hungry and needy for what feels like it’s being offered.

“You want.” His words come out raw and he doesn’t care, doesn’t care there’s tears clogging up his throat because he can smell them both and they’re smoky and sooty and so beautifully, brilliantly alive. “Me?”

“We change together,” Parker whispers, voice all sad. “We do. Right? Together? So we need you for that.”

Eliot swallows. “Do you-. I’m not going to leave. Ever. Unless you ask me.”

Parker pulls back to give him her annoyed face, lips tugged between her teeth, and Eliot wants to bury himself in her shoulder and not come out. He feels safe with them, caught between the two of them. He knows they’ll be there at his six, they’ll keep him safe, he can keep them safe. “We want more from you. We love you.”

Tears make his vision blur and he reaches up to grip at Hardison’s arm, and he knows that they’re rubbed raw from the chains and he knows-. He knows he couldn’t possibly deserve them, in a million goddamn years, but he’s been wanting _so long_. And he’s a selfish man, he’s not a good man.

“I love you.” It tastes like benediction on his tongue, like something worth savoring. “I love you both. So fucking much. I was so fucking scared. I love you. I l-.”

Alec tilts his head up and kisses him.

Alec kisses like he thought he would. Purposeful, warm, a little flicker of tongue. It makes Eliot’s cheeks heat and he feels himself go loose for it, pliant. Lets himself be kissed and grips onto Alec’s arms and kisses back with all he has, hot and heavy and needy.

And then it’s not Alec’s mouth on him but Parker, biting little nips that make him laugh and smile and cry, just a little. They make his spine tingle, every nerve in his body zinging alight.

“We love you,” Parker’s saying, in between sharp little kitten-kisses, “we love you, we need you, don’t leave.”

“Stay,” Alec’s saying, warm and soft and kind and so full of heat, whispering it into the space between their mouths, “stay with us, man. Forever, Eliot. You promised.”

And he kisses back and he says, “I love you, I need you, I won’t leave.”

And he says, “I can’t go, I don’t know where home is without you, I-. You make me feel something.”

And it’s true. He’s married to them in all but name, after all. Til his dying fucking day.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm gaydaryl on tumblr and gayjaaryl on twitter if you happen to wanna talk leverage with me!


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